Chrome to get new iPhone & iPad widgets for iOS/iPadOS 14

Earlier this year, Apple announced iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 and as a part of that general announcement, real widgets support finally showed up on iPhones and iPads. While those of us on Android devices don’t think much of widgets at this point, iPhone users have been asking for them for quite some time and Apple has finally relented on offering them in various sizes across all of your home screens, not just the Today View portion of the main interface.

Google already has a new, sweet-looking widget for the standard Google app for iOS and it looks like Chrome will be following suit with an iOS widget of its own. According to recent activity in the Chromium Repositories, it appears the Chrome team is hard at work on new widgets for Chrome as we speak. Take a look:

[iOS][WidgetKit] Add extension skeleton and flag

via the Chromium Repositories

[iOS][WidgetKit] Add assets for the search widget

via the Chromium Repositories

This work started just a couple weeks ago, it seems, so we are nowhere near this all arriving anytime soon. However, from the commits above, it is clear that there are new widgets being built for the iOS and iPadOS experience. As it currently stands, there are only the Chrome quick actions and suggested sites widgets for the Today View screen. While we don’t know what widgets are coming along with this effort, it is clear that we’ll be getting some sort of Chrome search widget.

At first I wondered if this was just work being done on the existing Chrome widgets, but right in the commit message that logic is quickly undone. WidgetKit is Apple’s new development tool for building widgets for iOS 14 and iPad OS 14, so these recent commits are clearly aimed at building new experiences for these new home screen widgets Apple just recently rolled out.

I have my trusty iPad Mini handy and am looking out for these widgets to show up in a future Chrome update and we’ll be reporting back when they do end up showing up. For now, just know that Chrome widgets are coming.